OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
PassVizor: Toward Better Understanding of the Dynamics of Soccer Passes
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

In soccer, passing is the most frequent interaction between players and plays a significant role in creating scoring chances. Experts are interested in analyzing players' passing behavior to learn passing tactics, i.e., how players build up an attack with passing. Various approaches have been proposed to facilitate the analysis of passing tactics. However, the dynamic changes of a team's employed tactics over a match have not been comprehensively investigated. To address the problem, we closely collaborate with domain experts and characterize requirements to analyze the dynamic changes of a team's passing tactics. To characterize the passing tactic employed for each attack, we propose a topic-based approach that provides a high-level abstraction of complex passing behaviors. Based on the model, we propose a glyph-based design to reveal the multi-variate information of passing tactics within different phases of attacks, including player identity, spatial context, and formation. We further design and develop PassVizor, a visual analytics system, to support the comprehensive analysis of passing dynamics. With the system, users can detect the changing patterns of passing tactics and examine the detailed passing process for evaluating passing tactics. We invite experts to conduct analysis with PassVizor and demonstrate the usability of the system through an expert interview.
A Visual Analytics Approach to Scheduling Customized Shuttle Buses via Perceiving Passengers' Travel Demands
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Shuttle buses have been a popular means to move commuters sharing similar origins and destinations during periods of high travel demand. However, planning and deploying reasonable, customized service bus systems becomes challenging when the commute demand is rather dynamic. It is difficult, if not impossible to form a reliable, unbiased estimation of user needs in such a case using traditional modeling methods. We propose a visual analytics approach to facilitating assessment of actual, varying travel demands and planning of night customized shuttle systems. A preliminary case study verifies the efficacy of our approach.
An Efficient Technique for Image Captioning using Deep Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

With the huge expansion of internet and trillions of gigabytes of data generated every single day, the needs for the development of various tools has become mandatory in order to maintain system adaptability to rapid changes. One of these tools is known as Image Captioning. Every entity in internet must be properly identified and managed and therefore in the case of image data, automatic captioning for identification is required. Similarly, content generation for missing labels, image classification and artificial languages all requires the process of Image Captioning. This paper discusses an efficient and unique way to perform automatic image captioning on individual image and discusses strategies to improve its performances and functionalities.
Low-cost Active Dry-Contact Surface EMG Sensor for Bionic Arms
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2020
Year: 2020

Surface electromyography (sEMG) is a popular bio-signal used for controlling prostheses and finger gesture recognition mechanisms. Myoelectric prostheses are costly, and most commercially available sEMG acquisition systems are not suitable for real-time gesture recognition. In this paper, a method of acquiring sEMG signals using novel low-cost, active, dry-contact, flexible sensors has been proposed. Since the active sEMG sensor was developed to be used along with a bionic arm, the sensor was tested for its ability to acquire sEMG signals that could be used for real-time classification of five selected gestures. In a study of 4 subjects, the average classification accuracy for real-time gesture classification using the active sEMG sensor system was 85%. The common-mode rejection ratio of the sensor was measured to 59 dB, and thus the sensor's performance was not substantially limited by its active circuitry. The proposed sensors can be interfaced with a variety of amplifiers to perform fully wearable sEMG acquisition. This satisfies the need for a low-cost sEMG acquisition system for prostheses.
"And the Winner Is...": Dynamic Lotteries for Multi-group Fairness-Aware Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

As recommender systems are being designed and deployed for an increasing number of socially-consequential applications, it has become important to consider what properties of fairness these systems exhibit. There has been considerable research on recommendation fairness. However, we argue that the previous literature has been based on simple, uniform and often uni-dimensional notions of fairness assumptions that do not recognize the real-world complexities of fairness-aware applications. In this paper, we explicitly represent the design decisions that enter into the trade-off between accuracy and fairness across multiply-defined and intersecting protected groups, supporting multiple fairness metrics. The framework also allows the recommender to adjust its performance based on the historical view of recommendations that have been delivered over a time horizon, dynamically rebalancing between fairness concerns. Within this framework, we formulate lottery-based mechanisms for choosing between fairness concerns, and demonstrate their performance in two recommendation domains.
Data Visualization Practitioners' Perspectives on Chartjunk
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Chartjunk is a popular yet contentious topic. Previous studies have shown that extreme minimalism is not always best, and that visual embellishments can be useful depending on the context. While more knowledge is being developed regarding the effects of embellishments on users, less attention has been given to the perspectives of practitioners regarding how they design with embellishments. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 data visualization practitioners, investigating how they understand chartjunk and the factors that influence how and when they make use of embellishments. Our investigation uncovers a broad and pluralistic understanding of chartjunk among practitioners, and foregrounds a variety of personal and situated factors that influence the use of chartjunk beyond context. We highlight the personal nature of design practice, and discuss the need for more practice-led research to better understand the ways in which concepts like chartjunk are interpreted and used by practitioners.
Blockchain-based Federated Learning for Device Failure Detection in Industrial IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Device failure detection is one of most essential problems in industrial internet of things (IIoT). However, in conventional IIoT device failure detection, client devices need to upload raw data to the central server for model training, which might lead to disclosure of sensitive business data. Therefore, in this paper, to ensure client data privacy, we propose a blockchain-based federated learning approach for device failure detection in IIoT. First, we present a platform architecture of blockchain-based federated learning systems for failure detection in IIoT, which enables verifiable integrity of client data. In the architecture, each client periodically creates a Merkle tree in which each leaf node represents a client data record, and stores the tree root on a blockchain. Further, to address the data heterogeneity issue in IIoT failure detection, we propose a novel centroid distance weighted federated averaging (CDW\_FedAvg) algorithm taking into account the distance between positive class and negative class of each client dataset. In addition, to motivate clients to participate in federated learning, a smart contact based incentive mechanism is designed depending on the size and the centroid distance of client data used in local model training. A prototype of the proposed architecture is implemented with our industry partner, and evaluated in terms of feasibility, accuracy and performance. The results show that the approach is feasible, and has satisfactory accuracy and performance.
Utilizing Citation Network Structure to Predict Citation Counts: A Deep Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

With the advancement of science and technology, the number of academic papers published in the world each year has increased almost exponentially. While a large number of research papers highlight the prosperity of science and technology, they also give rise to some problems. As we all know, academic papers are the most intuitive embodiment of the research results of scholars, which can reflect the level of researchers. It is also the evaluation standard for decision-making such as promotion and allocation of funds. Therefore, how to measure the quality of an academic paper is very important. The most common standard for measuring academic papers is the number of citation counts of papers, because this indicator is widely used in the evaluation of scientific publications, and it also serves as the basis for many other indicators (such as the h-index). Therefore, it is very important to be able to accurately predict the citation counts of academic papers. This paper proposes an end-to-end deep learning network, DeepCCP, which combines the effect of information cascade and looks at the citation counts prediction problem from the perspective of information cascade prediction. DeepCCP directly uses the citation network formed in the early stage of the paper as the input, and the output is the citation counts of the corresponding paper after a period of time. DeepCCP only uses the structure and temporal information of the citation network, and does not require other additional information, but it can still achieve outstanding performance. According to experiments on 6 real data sets, DeepCCP is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the accuracy of citation count prediction.
SilkViser:A Visual Explorer of Blockchain-based Cryptocurrency Transaction Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Many blockchain-based cryptocurrencies provide users with online blockchain explorers for viewing online transaction data. However, traditional blockchain explorers mostly present transaction information in textual and tabular forms. Such forms make understanding cryptocurrency transaction mechanisms difficult for novice users (NUsers). They are also insufficiently informative for experienced users (EUsers) to recognize advanced transaction information. This study introduces a new online cryptocurrency transaction data viewing tool called SilkViser. Guided by detailed scenario and requirement analyses, we create a series of appreciating visualization designs, such as paper ledger-inspired block and blockchain visualizations and ancient copper coin-inspired transaction visualizations, to help users understand cryptocurrency transaction mechanisms and recognize advanced transaction information. We also provide a set of lightweight interactions to facilitate easy and free data exploration. Moreover, a controlled user study is conducted to quantitatively evaluate the usability and effectiveness of SilkViser. Results indicate that SilkViser can satisfy the requirements of NUsers and EUsers. Our visualization designs can compensate for the inexperience of NUsers in data viewing and attract potential users to participate in cryptocurrency transactions.
Efficient Personalized Community Detection via Genetic Evolution
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Personalized community detection aims to generate communities associated with user need on graphs, which benefits many downstream tasks such as node recommendation and link prediction for users, etc. It is of great importance but lack of enough attention in previous studies which are on topics of user-independent, semi-supervised, or top-K user-centric community detection. Meanwhile, most of their models are time consuming due to the complex graph structure. Different from these topics, personalized community detection requires to provide higher-resolution partition on nodes that are more relevant to user need while coarser manner partition on the remaining less relevant nodes. In this paper, to solve this task in an efficient way, we propose a genetic model including an offline and an online step. In the offline step, the user-independent community structure is encoded as a binary tree. And subsequently an online genetic pruning step is applied to partition the tree into communities. To accelerate the speed, we also deploy a distributed version of our model to run under parallel environment. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that our model outperforms the state-of-arts with significantly reduced running time.
Length-optimal tool path planning for freeform surfaces with preferred feed directions
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents a new method to generate tool paths for machining freeform surfaces represented either as parametric surfaces or as triangular meshes. This method allows for the optimal tradeoff between the preferred feed direction field and the constant scallop height, and yields a minimized overall path length. The optimality is achieved by formulating tool path planning as a Poisson problem that minimizes a simple, quadratic energy. This Poisson formulation considers all tool paths at once, without resorting to any heuristic sampling or initial tool path choosing as in existing methods, and is thus a globally optimal solution. Finding the optimal tool paths amounts to solving a well-conditioned sparse linear system, which is computationally convenient and efficient. Tool paths are represented with an implicit scheme that can completely avoid the challenging topological issues of path singularities and self-intersections seen in previous methods. The presented method has been validated with a series of examples and comparisons.
Approaches, Challenges, and Applications for Deep Visual Odometry: Toward to Complicated and Emerging Areas
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Visual odometry (VO) is a prevalent way to deal with the relative localization problem, which is becoming increasingly mature and accurate, but it tends to be fragile under challenging environments. Comparing with classical geometry-based methods, deep learning-based methods can automatically learn effective and robust representations, such as depth, optical flow, feature, ego-motion, etc., from data without explicit computation. Nevertheless, there still lacks a thorough review of the recent advances of deep learning-based VO (Deep VO). Therefore, this paper aims to gain a deep insight on how deep learning can profit and optimize the VO systems. We first screen out a number of qualifications including accuracy, efficiency, scalability, dynamicity, practicability, and extensibility, and employ them as the criteria. Then, using the offered criteria as the uniform measurements, we detailedly evaluate and discuss how deep learning improves the performance of VO from the aspects of depth estimation, feature extraction and matching, pose estimation. We also summarize the complicated and emerging areas of Deep VO, such as mobile robots, medical robots, augmented reality and virtual reality, etc. Through the literature decomposition, analysis, and comparison, we finally put forward a number of open issues and raise some future research directions in this field.
IVACS: Intelligent Voice Assistant for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Self-Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

At the time of writing this paper, the world has around eleven million cases of COVID-19, scientifically known as severe acute respiratory syndrome corona-virus 2 (SARS-COV-2). One of the popular critical steps various health organizations are advocating to prevent the spread of this contagious disease is self-assessment of symptoms. Multiple organizations have already pioneered mobile and web-based applications for self-assessment of COVID-19 to reduce this global pandemic's spread. We propose an intelligent voice-based assistant for COVID-19 self-assessment (IVACS). This interactive assistant has been built to diagnose the symptoms related to COVID-19 using the guidelines provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The empirical testing of the application has been performed with 22 human subjects, all volunteers, using the NASA Task Load Index (TLX), and subjects performance accuracy has been measured. The results indicate that the IVACS is beneficial to users. However, it still needs additional research and development to promote its widespread application.
Automatic Dialect Adaptation in Finnish and its Effect on Perceived Creativity
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We present a novel approach for adapting text written in standard Finnish to different dialects. We experiment with character level NMT models both by using a multi-dialectal and transfer learning approaches. The models are tested with over 20 different dialects. The results seem to favor transfer learning, although not strongly over the multi-dialectal approach. We study the influence dialectal adaptation has on perceived creativity of computer generated poetry. Our results suggest that the more the dialect deviates from the standard Finnish, the lower scores people tend to give on an existing evaluation metric. However, on a word association test, people associate creativity and originality more with dialect and fluency more with standard Finnish.
SemEval-2020 Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2020 Task 11 on Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles. The task featured two subtasks. Subtask SI is about Span Identification: given a plain-text document, spot the specific text fragments containing propaganda. Subtask TC is about Technique Classification: given a specific text fragment, in the context of a full document, determine the propaganda technique it uses, choosing from an inventory of 14 possible propaganda techniques. The task attracted a large number of participants: 250 teams signed up to participate and 44 made a submission on the test set. In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For both subtasks, the best systems used pre-trained Transformers and ensembles.
The Mixture Graph-A Data Structure for Compressing, Rendering, and Querying Segmentation Histograms
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we present a novel data structure, called the Mixture Graph. This data structure allows us to compress, render, and query segmentation histograms. Such histograms arise when building a mipmap of a volume containing segmentation IDs. Each voxel in the histogram mipmap contains a convex combination (mixture) of segmentation IDs. Each mixture represents the distribution of IDs in the respective voxel's children. Our method factorizes these mixtures into a series of linear interpolations between exactly two segmentation IDs. The result is represented as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) whose nodes are topologically ordered. Pruning replicate nodes in the tree followed by compression allows us to store the resulting data structure efficiently. During rendering, transfer functions are propagated from sources (leafs) through the DAG to allow for efficient, pre-filtered rendering at interactive frame rates. Assembly of histogram contributions across the footprint of a given volume allows us to efficiently query partial histograms, achieving up to 178$\times$ speed-up over na$\mathrm{ï}$ve parallelized range queries. Additionally, we apply the Mixture Graph to compute correctly pre-filtered volume lighting and to interactively explore segments based on shape, geometry, and orientation using multi-dimensional transfer functions.
Efficient Pedestrian Detection in Top-View Fisheye Images Using Compositions of Perspective View Patches
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Pedestrian detection in images is a topic that has been studied extensively, but existing detectors designed for perspective images do not perform as successfully on images taken with top-view fisheye cameras, mainly due to the orientation variation of people in such images. In our proposed approach, several perspective views are generated from a fisheye image and then concatenated to form a composite image. As pedestrians in this composite image are more likely to be upright, existing detectors designed and trained for perspective images can be applied directly without additional training. We also describe a new method of mapping detection bounding boxes from the perspective views to the fisheye frame. The detection performance on several public datasets compare favorably with state-of-the-art results.
Secure Memory Management on Modern Hardware
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2020
Year: 2020

Almost all modern hardware, from phone SoCs to high-end servers with accelerators, contain memory translation and protection hardware like IOMMUs, firewalls, and lookup tables which make it impossible to reason about, and enforce protection and isolation based solely on the processor's MMUs. This has led to numerous bugs and security vulnerabilities in today's system software. In this paper we regain the ability to reason about and enforce access control using the proven concept of a reference monitor mediating accesses to memory resources. We present a fine-grained, realistic memory protection model that makes this traditional concept applicable today, and bring system software in line with the complexity of modern, heterogeneous hardware. Our design is applicable to any operating system, regardless of architecture. We show that it not only enforces the integrity properties of a system, but does so with no inherent performance overhead and it is even amenable to automation through code generation from trusted hardware specifications.
Romanian Diacritics Restoration Using Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Diacritics restoration is a mandatory step for adequately processing Romanian texts, and not a trivial one, as you generally need context in order to properly restore a character. Most previous methods which were experimented for Romanian restoration of diacritics do not use neural networks. Among those that do, there are no solutions specifically optimized for this particular language (i.e., they were generally designed to work on many different languages). Therefore we propose a novel neural architecture based on recurrent neural networks that can attend information at different levels of abstractions in order to restore diacritics.
TRANSPR: Transparency Ray-Accumulating Neural 3D Scene Point Renderer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We propose and evaluate a neural point-based graphics method that can model semi-transparent scene parts. Similarly to its predecessor pipeline, ours uses point clouds to model proxy geometry, and augments each point with a neural descriptor. Additionally, a learnable transparency value is introduced in our approach for each point. Our neural rendering procedure consists of two steps. Firstly, the point cloud is rasterized using ray grouping into a multi-channel image. This is followed by the neural rendering step that "translates" the rasterized image into an RGB output using a learnable convolutional network. New scenes can be modeled using gradient-based optimization of neural descriptors and of the rendering network. We show that novel views of semi-transparent point cloud scenes can be generated after training with our approach. Our experiments demonstrate the benefit of introducing semi-transparency into the neural point-based modeling for a range of scenes with semi-transparent parts.